


Prompt: Protocols

by EssayOfThoughts



Series: MCU Maximoff Oneshots [70]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Bucky trains the twins, Codependency, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-02
Updated: 2016-05-02
Packaged: 2018-06-05 23:38:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,265
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6727963
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EssayOfThoughts/pseuds/EssayOfThoughts
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>His mind is… she can feel Pietro’s concern echoing down her connection to his mind, but this man’s, this man before them… his mind is empty. There is nothing there but sliding pieces, the machinery of protocols designed to make him as simple as possible, input-output like a calculator or computer. Strucker says something to the man in a harsh rattle of poorly accented Russian - more poorly accented than her and Pietro’s - and pieces of the man’s mind slide and shift, momentary memories flashing up like punchcards extracted on demand.</p><p>Wanda may have only had her powers for a few days, almost a week, but she has never yet seen a mind like this.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Prompt: Protocols

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lucdarling](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lucdarling/gifts).



> AU basis is as follows: Bucky was recaptured after CATWS by Strucker’s branch of not-S.H.I.E.L.D.-HYDRA, and then used to train the twins once their powers stabilised. This was written for a prompt on my tumblr, readable [Here](http://essayofthoughts.tumblr.com/post/143747766235/uh-heres-a-prompt-the-twins-are-trained-with). Also going to add a note here - this is my 101st fic total on this blog, and my 70th fic in this series!

**i.**  
The twins have only had their powers a few days when Wanda feels the change in the base. Minds are still vague and hard to parse for her, she can _see_ them, but she can’t read them without effort - with the exception of Pietro’s, who’s mind opens to her’s like a flower to the sun - but when something changes she can feel the ripples that flow out from whatever stone has been thrown into the pool of the castle.

This stone is causing  _fear_. 

She can feel the ripples of it through everyone’s minds; even Strucker is wary and concerned and remains so even as, a few days later, he leads them from their cells to the room they’d first been brought to when they’d arrived.

Standing to attention in the middle of the room is a man with a metal arm.

 

 

* * *

 

 

**ii.**  
His mind is… she can feel Pietro’s concern echoing down her connection to his mind, but this man’s, this man before them… his mind is empty. There is nothing there but sliding pieces, the machinery of protocols designed to make him as simple as possible, input-output like a calculator or computer. Strucker says something to the man in a harsh rattle of poorly accented Russian - more poorly accented than her and Pietro’s - and pieces of the man’s mind slide and shift, momentary memories flashing up like punchcards extracted on demand.

Wanda may have only had her powers for a few days, almost a week, but she has never yet seen a mind like this.

“This,” Strucker says to them, “is the Winter Soldier. He is here to train you. You speak Russian, yes?”

Pietro glares. Wanda nods, smiles half-mockingly and murmurs, “ _Da_.”

 

* * *

 

 **iii.**  
Training is… this is not like when they were asked to use their powers so the techs could study them, this is not like when Wanda sent scarlet snaking through Pietro’s mind so he could manage the speeds he ran at. This is not like anything before, with the Winter Soldier teaching them weapons and fighting stances, adapting his own style of fighting to Pietro’s speed and Wanda’s scarlet until even their enhancements give them next to no advantage.

 _Maybe-,_ Wanda thinks, and Pietro thinks, _No._

 _It may work_ , Wanda points out. _Jam a protocol, like jamming a wheel of a police car._

Beside her, watching the Winter Soldier, Pietro sighs. _If he breaks and hurts us-_

 _Then you will get us out_.

 

* * *

 

 **iv.**  
Scarlet snakes out of Wanda’s fingers and while she’s used scarlet in Winter’s mind to see what he will do - when she can parse the odd pattern of his various protocols - she has not done this, this trick she has only yet practiced with Pietro, to alter the flow of a thought into something else.

Wanda finds the protocol, already moving at the sight of her scarlet drifting out of her fingers, and sends scarlet into it, solidifying, breaking the pattern of the protocol. Inside Winter’s mind the pattern halts, breaks, tries again to complete the action and jams again. 

Behind the protocol a memory - not a punchcard of information but a _memory_  - floats free.

 _Pietro_ , Wanda sends to her brother, darting close to take down Winter. _Duck_.

Pietro only just manages to duck before Winter’s metal arm strikes out, punching into the wall.

 

* * *

 

 **v.**  
“What did you do?” Winter asks in hissed and angry Russian, movements still stuttering. His metal arm is still outstretched, fist embedded in the stone of the wall. His hair is in his face, muzzle over his mouth still, but the words are unmistakeable. 

Not the calm precise words of his every reply before, fixed into perfect responses by protocol after protocol, no. The words of a _person_ , and an angry one at that.

Pietro is at Wanda’s shoulder, darting back and forth between right and left, watching as Wanda pulls more and more scarlet into being, ready in case this break of Winter’s will do them harm.

“I halted a protocol,” Wanda says. “In your mind. Broke the pattern.”

Winter may be wearing a muzzle but there is no doubt his next word is a snarl.  _“Why?”_

Wanda can see in his mind, memories shaking loose in pale shapes from the jammed protocol in his mind. She wonders if he’s trying to buy time enough for the memories to form into sense, a pale patchwork of lost memories, and starts sending scarlet to poke them into some kind of order.

“Break the pattern of your mind, break your movement,” Wanda says, walking slowly to one side around Winter, Pietro following her as she nears the door. “Gives us advantage when you are stuck with your arm in the wall.”

The memories in Winter’s mind are clotting, breaking the protocol completely, pasting over the scarlet stone that Wanda had lodged there. Around it emotions swirl like the idea of pain around a wound, and Wanda understands that, for once, Winter is _confused_.

 

* * *

 

 **vi.**  
_He is like us_ , Wanda sends. _Differently but the same. We have our protocols, but they are… organic. We made them for **us**. His protocols were forced on him._

Beside her Pietro is still nervous, she can see how his legs are jittering, sense how, when Winter wrenches his arm free of the wall, he wants nothing more than to pick her up and carry her from the room.

“Calm,” she says to him, in Sokovian. “Stay calm.”

Winter, before them, is shaking his head like there is something giving him a constant twitch in his neck, like something trying to reset and failing.

“Hey,” Wanda says in Sokovian, and then, in Russian. “Let me? I can-”

“Do not touch me,” Winter says, a snarl again.

“Please,” Wanda says. “If they realise, see that you are broken-”

Winter’s eyes are as fierce and focussed as Pietro’s can be when they fix on her. “They will wipe me,” he says, and Wanda sees the memory of a chair and blinding pain, sees Winter remade to a blank slate over and over. 

“They will change you,” Wanda says. “Do not know how, but they will. Let me-” she stretches out hands slowly, wide swathes of scarlet swirling around her fingers. “Please. I can halt nightmares, jam protocols. Let me-”

“Do not _fix_  it,” Winter says. 

Wanda blinks, watches his eyes bright and fierce over the dark of his muzzle, beneath the dark of his brows and hair. “Hide it,” she breathes, soft enough the watching cameras cannot hear. “Let me,” she says. “They will hurt us all for failing, otherwise.”

Winter is like a wild animal as Wanda brings her hands nearer, as the scarlet dancing between her fingers dances into his mind, creates a workaround for the protocol, interfacing as completely as it can with the other protocols of Winter’s mind. 

She is barely done when Winter pulls her into a chokehold.

“Good tactic,” he says, in Russian as precise as before. “Again.”

Wanda pulls scarlet through herself to strike him as Pietro runs to trip him.

 

* * *

 

 **vii.**  
Winter is, for whatever reason, allowed to join them when they go to dinner that evening. Wanda suspects that this, like so many other things, is a test. Her hand on Pietro’s wrist keeps him silent, a single nigh-invisible thread of scarlet into Winter’s warns him of the watching eyes.

They cannot speak here, will not speak here. Strucker has guessed of _some_  of what had happened in the training room, and they cannot let him know the extent. 

Cells, maybe, or the corridors where the sounds of footsteps muffle words anyway, where Wanda and Pietro have already mastered murmuring words so smoothly cameras cannot spot their lips moving nor hear them over the slap of feet against stone. 

They sit at benches, side by side and opposite Winter, and Wanda barely acknowledges his presence. 

“Pietro,” she says instead, fingers catching her brother’s jaw. “If you are having nightmares you should tell me, rather than let them wake me.”

Pietro’s eyes dart down to her hand, away to his bowl of soup. “You are tired enough,” he replies. “With all the minds around you. I do not want to worry you or wake you.”

Wanda’s smile is small and gentle. “So let me chase the nightmares away.”

Across from them Winter glances up to where Strucker sits, waits for the man’s nod before removing the muzzle. Behind the muzzle is a face… oddly young and yet as old and tired as they, Wanda thinks. Winter eats the food before them with movements as precise as any of his protocols, and Wanda can see, in his mind, the protocols he is following, rules for nutrition and movement pared down to absolute efficiency. With what little discussion the twins have need of done, they quietly follow suit.

 

* * *

 

 **viii.**  
They are not surprised when Winter follows them out of the mess hall, muzzle replaced. His words, in clean precise Russian, are no surprise either: “I will walk you to your cells.” 

His boots, their shoes make enough covering noise as they walk down the first of the corridors to their cells deep beneath the castle.

“The protocols,” Wanda says softly, barely audible over the sound of their footsteps, and certainly not loud enough for the watching cameras. “Where are they from?”

Winter gives a careful movement of his shoulders that could just as easily be loosening up a muscle in case of an escape attempt as the shrug Wanda is almost certain it is. “Non-relevant information,” he says, and Wanda sees the input-output of his mind, other protocols unaffected by the damage she did to one.

“Do you want them undone?” she asks, and she remembers when she asked Pietro this, of the protocols in his mind, so many on top of so many, all dedicated to keeping her safe. Pietro had said no. She does not know what Winter will say.

“Some,” he replies. “But to get out. The man. I knew him. I need the protocols.”

“Precision,” Pietro murmurs, more to Wanda than to Winter. 

 

* * *

 

 **ix.**  
They have to be careful with conversation. Wanda does not know what has been done to Winter’s mind, but she can see it’s effects in everything he does, every precise movement, every precisely given word, every sliding protocol, and neatly made punchcard in his mind. It is not _natural_ , nor is it right. She is hesitant to even consider some of Pietro’s self-made protocols _right_  but he at least chose them. 

Winter… with every memory that comes snaking out each time she jams a protocol she can see that choice has been the farthest thing from what Winter has had.

 _Who did this?_  she asks one session, ducking beneath the steel arm, using her scarlet to catch and redirect the knife Pietro has thrown. _Why did they do this?_

Winter cannot speak a reply, not with Strucker in the room as he is this time, but he offers up memories, a tentacled skull, a short fat man with glasses, a man in a Russian uniform, a Nazi swastika.

Wanda recalls the tentacle-skull from when she had scanned Strucker’s mind, the echoing ring of “ _Heil HYDRA_.” She pushes the memory into Winter’s mind and he flinches so hard her redirected knife goes straight between his ribs.

 

* * *

 

 **x.**  
“What was that?” Winter asks, hissed in hurried Russian when everyone else has left medical. Wanda is half-asleep in her seat, leaning against Pietro so he answers instead of her.

“She finds memories,” he says, stroking back Wanda’s hair with careful fingers. “From other minds. That was Strucker.”

Wanda may be dozing but she is still alert enough to see mingling memories rising from Winter’s mind, and alert enough to send them through to Pietro. 

“He was remade by them,” Pietro murmurs in rapid Sokovian once he has parsed them all. “Made for them as an irony against America.” Against him, Wanda frowns. Pietro pulls up one of the memories, a man wearing a flag for a uniform. Wanda is quiet, considers.

They only have so much freedom because of their powers, are as unharmed as they are because of the same. They are held here only by loyalty for a promise completed, a promise that, had it failed, would have ended in their own deaths. Strucker, they know, has no reason to try to coerce their loyalty when he thinks he already has it, from false promises for vengeance, false promises that they will remake and repair Novi Grad and the whole of Sokovia.

They want vengeance on Stark still, yes, but now they see what has been done to Winter, know the lies they have been told, know this is not S.H.I.E.L.D. but HYDRA and that they in turn are Nazis…

Wanda doubts that staying will do any good.

“Will they wipe us?” she asks, Russian quick and quiet enough the cameras would only pick up fragments.

“Likely,” replies Winter. “They will wipe me again, eventually.”

Pietro shifts slightly, tucks Wanda more securely against his shoulder. “So,” he says, tone considering, words quick. “We get out first.”

 

* * *

 

 **xi.**  
Slipping into a mindset like Winter’s Asset protocols is... Neither of them want it. Both of them would much rather leave their minds whole and entire, but they need synchrony and balance and understanding, and so Wanda links Winter into their paired minds, recreates Winter’s protocols around Pietro’s tree, replaces the cathedral façade of her mind until it is Winter’s protocols over the synagogue base of her mind. 

She can feel Pietro’s mind bucking at some of the protocols, ones which run too far counter to his own natural ones, and finds the right balance of his own protocols and hers, and Winter’s.

It pleases Strucker when he sees them fight like this, three in perfect balanced synchrony, as neat and tidy and complete as a machine. Beneath the protocols they are running under, they all three of them think the same thing.

_They don’t want people. They want weapons._

 

* * *

 

 **xii.**  
When the Avengers come the twins and Winter - _Bucky_ , Wanda reminds Pietro, the name dragged up as they spent more time beneath protocols, _Bucky_ \- have been ready for a long while. They have sunk into the protocols they have constructed, made of the Asset mindset’s forced ones, and their own created ones, and some, some ancient buried designs, from where Bucky lies beneath the machinery of Winter’s mind.

They are a trio in perfect synchrony, linked by Wanda’s scarlet, Pietro’s speed of observation, Asset-Bucky’s quick planning. Not-Asset, and Not-Asset and Winter, used to cleaning guns, marching together, fighting and sparring in perfect balance, minds calm and empty but for the simple purpose of the protocols. Beneath the protocols, their minds wait, and watch.

They expect for Winter to be deployed by Strucker, expect that they will have to plan around that if they are to leave HYDRA, but Strucker seems aware enough that Winter is Bucky Barnes and that if anything can pull Bucky Barnes out of the Asset mindset of Winter’s complex protocols then it is Captain Steve Rogers. 

Winter is held back. The twins are deemed not ready. 

Strucker decides to surrender, and, as one, the three of them leave. 

 _Outside_ , Wanda sends, Bucky already taking his weapons, collecting the guns he knows he will need, Pietro already scooping Wanda up, fetching the bags they had come with. Bucky is already perched in a tree by the time Pietro has run a circuit around the castle and satisfied himself that Wanda will be safe at Winter’s side.

“I can climb,” she whispers to Pietro in Russian as he boosts her into the tree, Wanda pushing herself up with scarlet to perch beside Bucky. _Run circuits_ , she suggests. _Knock down anyone Bucky cannot snipe._

Pietro gives her a brief salute before sprinting off.

 

* * *

 

 **xiii.**  
Wanda’s mind spreads out around them, Bucky has been linked into them for months, Wanda making the effort to ensure she can understand every protocol of the Asset mindset, every memory that floats up from his mind, until he links into the dual minds that Wanda-and-Pietro are in fights as readily as they do.

In the Asset mindset they have a perfect, complete synchrony, all of Wanda and Pietro’s already practiced duality readily accepting a third aspect, accommodating the Asset’s protocols, Wanda’s scarlet showing the Asset mindset how to incorporate theirs. 

Bucky doesn’t like it, beneath the thick layers of protocols that make up Winter, and Wanda can see how following Asset protocols and their protocols run collectively counter to the base protocols of his natural mindset. Above the protocols, watching them, there is no disruption, nothing but calm input-output, precise protocols and punchcard memories. Beneath them...

 _It is temporary,_  she promises him for the umpteenth time. _Once we are away, we can be free of this. Have our own minds back_.

From his perch beside her, Bucky lets his rifle drop for a moment, glances to her. He does not need to speak, nor her to listen to know the question he is asking. _Will we ever be free of this?_

 

* * *

 

 **xiv.**  
Pietro’s tug to their attention is less a tug as much as an outright yank, and only Wanda’s scarlet and Winter’s reflexes catch them before they fall from their perches in the tree. _Hurry,_  he sends, and a flurry of images of various Avengers. The memory of one of them, dressed in a flag, sends a wave of loss and longing to the twins’ minds from Bucky’s.

 _Steve_ , comes the thought, and Wanda’s hand gently reaches to take Winter’s steel one.

 _We will be free_ , she sends.

 

* * *

 

 **xv.**  
When they arrive at the line Wanda scans out for Pietro’s mind, tugging at the thread that ties them together. He is by her side in a moment, a mere split of blue and silver, and together, as their triple collective, they approach the ones with shield and hammer.

The twins do not miss how the one with the shield pauses when he sees Bucky at Wanda’s left.

“Buck,” the man murmurs. Bucky’s mind sends out another swamping wave, loss and longing and an ache the twins recognise from when they had been kept apart in their cells. Wanda sighs, lifts her hands and breaks the scarlet bonds. 

“We are free,” she says in Russian, and Bucky steps forward.

 

* * *

 

 **xvi.**  
Wanda’s mind is almost blinded by the bright wave of joy that shines from the Captain’s mind and Bucky’s when they clasp hands. Beside them, the man with a hammer watches her and Pietro warily, apparently trusting the Captain to be able to handle himself. She can still feel Bucky’s mind, feel the outlines of the protocols still in place, ready even with his true mind freed, and knows that, should it be necessary, he can be tugged into their ready trio if it comes to a fight. 

Wanda thinks, looking at the Captain’s arms around Bucky, as warm and close an embrace as any she and Pietro have shared, looking at the wary but patient face of the one with the hammer, it may not be necessary.

“We do not want to fight,” Wanda says, in Sokovian and then in English. The man with the hammer nods at both.

“We want,” says Pietro, beside her, “To be free.” Wanda can see in his mind, now the Asset protocols have been broken loose, bubbling up with life again. “We hate Stark,” Pietro says, and Wanda’s hand tightens to white-knuckled strength around his. “But _fuck_  the Nazis.”

 

* * *

 

**Author's Note:**

> If you enjoyed this please leave a comment!


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